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Mama Africa

This post is a sort of counterpoint to the previous one, I suppose. A couple of years back, in order to get myself out of a bad mood, I decided to search online for some information related to poverty, as my status as a well-educated American is certainly a very enviable one, globally speaking. I happened upon some Human Development Index (HDI) charts, and they brought me to tears. At the bottom of the list were the nations of sub-Saharan Africa. I think Niger was at the bottom of the list. And it struck me, as it has struck me many times before—–
Why is it that the darker the skin, the poorer the man?
Why is it that the poorest countries have the darkest-skinned people? Or,
Why is it that, in every country (even in populations where everyone is dark-skinned), the poorest people or the people at the bottom of society are the most dark?

The negative effects of this are numerous. Not only is there the obvious issue of racial discrimination, but also issues of public health, education, political access, and economics. The causes are also numerous: colonialism, capitalism gone wild, internal strife/civil war, the interaction of genetics and culture (social Darwinism), the caste system (in India; caste means “color,” but it also relates to labor and one’s particular social group). People of non-white cultures will most certainly freely admit that there is discrimination among them, and lighter-skinned people are considered “better.”

But when this issue is on such a continental scale, when the poorest nations are all centered on one continent, one cannot help but ask why this is so, and why more effective efforts are not being done? What is it about the intertwining of capitalism and race that has led to such social stratification? One person alone cannot provide all the answers; even governments and institutions struggle with this and have been struggling with this for centuries.

Perhaps part of it begins with those of us in the developed world examining our perceptions, or shall we say, misperceptions of Africa as all one monolithic place. The continent is a conglomeration of many races, religions, languages, and cultures. Over 50 countries comprise the continent countries which can be perceived as various regions, such as Egypt and the Maghreb (the Muslim north); the Saharan countries which are so sparsely populated and often nomadic; Western Africa, from where American blacks trace their ancestry, with oil-rich Nigeria; the cradle of human origins in Eastern Africa, mountainous regions as well as plains; Central Africa, former colonies which are still undergoing much political strife as well as being developed for harvesting natural resources, and the world’s poorest country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Southern Africa with its ever-continuing legacy of European settlers and high rates of AIDS. These are but crass generalizations, but it is imperative that people see Africa as a continent with great diversity connected through geography, history, and, sadly, poverty and a lack of development.

It is not simply fashionable, leftist rhetoric to raise these questions and correlate poverty with skin color; the statistics speak for themselves. This is the beauty of the social sciences, to be able to connect theories about society with the hard data that backs it up. We must examine the manifestations of poverty in each of our societies and communities in which we live. We must be willing to ask the hard questions and examine the hard answers. Yes, it may be ugly. But so is the reality that billions of people all over the world, not just in Africa, are facing.